The Interaction Between Politics And Law: Understanding The Nature And Dynamics Of The Legal Framework Governing The Use Of Force (Part I)

By Cenap Çakmak

A recurring puzzle in contemporary international relations is why the rules governing the use of force—particularly the prohibition on unilateral use of force—have failed to prevent recurring crises in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, and elsewhere. Public and academic debates typically respond with familiar questions: What does international law provide? Who violated which rule? What sanctions apply? While these are understandable questions, they are not the most analytically productive ones. These questions assume that the fundamental function of international law is to prevent violations through immediate compliance and enforcement. When violations occur repeatedly, the superficial conclusion is: either there is no meaningful international law in this area, or the law serves only the interests of the powerful.

This policy brief rejects both conclusions. A more appropriate inquiry is both functional and political in nature: Under what conditions does international law regarding the use of force operate, why does it function in some contexts, why does it fail in others, and what kinds of political and institutional arrangements determine these outcomes? When these questions are asked, the focus shifts from the legal text alone to the interaction between law, power, institutions, legitimacy, and practice.

The central claim advanced here is that the realm of the use of force has never been governed by a truly rule-based order in the strong sense associated with supranational authority. Instead, this realm is governed by a hybrid legal-political architecture that constantly shifts between permission, regulation, and restriction. Therefore, the system’s apparent failures should be understood not as evidence that the system has collapsed, but as manifestations of its design features.

International Law as Ideal and Practice

First, a central conceptual distinction must be made: International law can be understood both as an ideal and as a practice, and the analytical failure to distinguish these two dimensions often lies at the root of the confusion in contemporary debates regarding the use of force. As an ideal, international law expresses the normative imagination of the global order; it is the realm of principles, moral aspirations, doctrinal subtleties, and academic innovations where legal possibility is first grasped. Legal scholars, philosophers, epistemic communities, and normative entrepreneurs articulate what the international community ought to be in this form. However, as a practice, international law refers to the transformation of these aspirations into institutional practices, state consent, procedural mechanisms, and applicable standards operating within the constraints of political authority. The distance between these two forms is not a sign of weakness but a structural feature of how international law has developed: while ideals set the direction, practice subjects these ideals to negotiation, institutional design, and the realities of power. Therefore, a serious assessment of the legal framework regarding the use of force must begin by acknowledging that the law’s normative ambition and its political instrumentalization are distinct yet constantly interacting layers of the same legal order.

International Law as an Ideal

As an ideal, international law signifies far more than the positive rules currently recognized by states; it embodies the normative, intellectual, and aspirational horizon of the global legal order. In this dimension, law exists first and foremost as a project of imagination, critique, and moral reasoning before being transformed into institutional practice. Therefore, the formative sources of law are not limited to treaty negotiations or the consent of states; but extend to academic interventions, judicial interpretation, transnational advocacy networks, epistemic communities, the mobilization of civil society, and the work of normative entrepreneurs who articulate new legal possibilities in response to emerging forms of violence, injustice, or political transformation. Within this idealized framework, international law functions as a lexicon through which the international community imagines not merely how the global order currently is, but how it ought to be.

A significant portion of the most transformative developments in the history of international law emerged precisely in this ideal form, long before receiving official political approval. For example, the gradual development of international humanitarian law emerged from an ongoing process of moral and legal reflection on the limits of violence and the protection of non-combatants, evolving from traditional constraints and doctrinal debates into codified treaty obligations. Similarly, the recognition of genocide as an autonomous international crime and its eventual codification began as an intellectual and ethical response to the inadequacy of existing legal categories to encompass the extermination of protected groups of people, demonstrating that conceptual innovation often precedes institutional acceptance. The global movement to ban anti-personnel landmines has followed a similar trajectory: a process that began as a humanitarian and advocacy-driven normative campaign ultimately reshaped state preferences and evolved into binding legal commitments. The establishment of the International Criminal Court also reflects the transformation of a long-standing normative aspiration—such as the idea that individuals, including state leaders, should be held criminally accountable for crimes of atrocity—into a permanent institutional structure. More recently, the doctrine of the responsibility to protect demonstrates how international legal thought can seek to reconcile the sovereignty of states with the imperative to protect people—first as a moral proposition, and later as a normative framework emerging within multilateral diplomacy.

Viewed from this perspective, international law begins not as an immediately functional framework, but as a normative project that challenges existing political realities and proposes alternative standards of legitimacy. Thus, its ideal dimension plays a constitutive role: it generates the concepts, moral vocabulary, and legal imagination that can subsequently guide official rules, institutions, and enforcement mechanisms. For this reason, the ideal and practical dimensions of international law should be understood not as separate spheres but as successive stages within a broader process of normative evolution; in this process, legal ideas are first designed, debated, and legitimized before entering the realm of practical governance.

International law in practice

The second form of international law that must be understood is “law in practice”; that is, the stage at which normative goals are transformed into institutionalized rules, procedures, doctrines of interpretation, and decision-making practices capable of guiding behavior in the real world. If “law as an ideal” represents the imaginary and normative horizon of the global order, then “law in practice” constitutes its entry into the realm of governance; here, abstract principles must be made applicable, interpretable, and enforceable. At this point, legal ideas no longer stand on their own through moral force or academic persuasion; they have become embedded in institutions, codified through official instruments, and made functional through bureaucratic, judicial, and diplomatic processes. Institutions such as the International Law Commission, the United Nations, regional organizations, treaty bodies, arbitration mechanisms, and international or hybrid courts play a central role in this transformation by converting normative projects into enforceable legal standards capable of regulating state behavior, structuring expectations, and providing frameworks for adjudication.

This stage is where politics becomes particularly visible and decisive. While the intellectual architecture of legal norms may stem from academic studies, judicial innovations, or transnational advocacy, their existence as operative law depends on actors possessing political authority—above all, states. States decide whether to accept treaty obligations, how to incorporate international commitments into their domestic legal systems, which interpretive approaches to prioritize, and under what conditions implementation may be postponed, restricted, or strategically resisted. Even if norms appear to be formally established, their meanings are constantly renegotiated through state practices, diplomatic disputes, reservations, selective compliance, and institutional bargaining. Consequently, the application of international law cannot be separated from the distribution of power, the logic of strategic interests, and the broader legitimacy structures within which legal institutions operate. In this sense, application and enforcement are not merely technical stages following legal creation; they are, in and of themselves, profound political arenas where the content and scope of law are frequently redefined.

This distinction between ideal law and applied law is analytically significant; for many contemporary critiques of international law lump these two dimensions together under a single umbrella and thus misdiagnose the nature of legal weakness. A common tendency in both academic and political debates is to evaluate the practical performance of international legal institutions against the highest moral ideals enshrined in the ideal form of law. When actual outcomes fall short—as is often the case in the contexts of war, oppression, occupation, or geopolitical competition—the resulting inconsistency is interpreted as evidence of legal failure, hypocrisy, or even systemic collapse. Yet such outcomes often overlook the structural reality that the transition from normative aspiration to practical governance necessitates mediation through political feasibility, institutional design, and states’ uneven commitments.

Therefore, the gap between these two forms should not be read as evidence of the collapse of international law. Rather, this gap reflects the structural tension between normative goals and political possibilities; a tension that has accompanied international law throughout its historical evolution. Paradoxically, the existence of this gap serves as evidence that law embodies an ideological surplus beyond immediate political realities: while law continues to articulate standards that transcend existing power dynamics, it simultaneously seeks channels for institutional realization. Understanding this dynamic is essential to resisting overly reductionist narratives that confuse gaps in implementation with legal irrelevance. The resilience of international law lies precisely in its ability to constantly navigate the space between ideal and practice, and to maintain its normative orientation even when political implementation is partial, contentious, or delayed.